I’ve just flipped through my starred RSS feeds and one said: How to sell enterprise 2.0 to executives (see: Intranet Blog, http://bit.ly/iRlhb7). Since I’ve spend almost two years discussion enterprise 2.0/social business on executive and operations level I realized: there’s actually no ‘selling’ necessary. In particular on executive level.

That existing communication and collaboration methods aren’t helping to unleash the corporate productivity and innovation power is crystal clear to them. That the e-mail avalanche and endless meeting days cause a lot pressure and frustration amongst their most valuable employees and managers is obvious.

What all executives and operations managers are looking for is an answer to the question: how shall we fix this. What they don’t want is experiments. Adding even more stress to the already demeaning life by more and more IT platforms has proven to be the wrong way. Nevertheless, a lot of companies start introducing social business platforms as potential solutions to their challenges – mostly driven from within and hardly being a synched initiative across the entire organization. What you get in addition to the operational challenges is a scattered IT infrastructure and disconnected groups that run their own solution program and way of working.

Back to the point of selling enterprise 2.0…

From my perspective the magic in becoming an enterprise 2.0 doesn’t lie within the IT. It won’t come as part of software boxes or consulting packages – not even from change management by the text book.

Firstly there’s an important element in social media and social business: it is SOCIAL. It’s driven by the protagonists and participants. By people. Humans. Therefore the first step to being more 2.0ish is openess to social behavior and the will to motivate employees to act socially at the work place: – share, contribute, participate – interact beyond borders (functionally/geographically) – inspire and be inspired – connect, related and maybe even befriend

That requires a cultural and work cultural foundation – the honest intention to overcome purely hierarchical thinking and fully pre-defined operations models. Of course it requires a platform (yes, an IT solution) as well, which encourages and enables employees to apply social behavior at the work place (see DesireIT whitepaper http://db.tt/tsU6z18)

That brings me to my second point. The point that that I’ve blogged about some time ago: making the new socially inspired efforts not the next bottleneck in business operations. Social business can create the connections between successful and efficient operations, effective building and using the corporate DNA and the people that are willing to help or can be the source of essential expertise and experience (see Desire-it.de, http://goo.gl/Ue41h). If the new IT services become and additional burden to everyday life because all you now do is tag, share, like or follow the downfall won’t be unfocused employees. It will be that employees will not adapt the new ways of working. They will simply find a way around it and THAT will cause even more friction than writing a blog or two once in a while… The new services have to blend in with the work that has to be done anyway. Solution knowledge may come as a side product, connecting the right talent to a challenge happens pro-actively. They have to be seen as a real service offering and work relief for employees. Not as Facebook for business…

Making executives understand that it’s about motivating people and about finding the right way to link the individual business operations to effectiveness and the power of the crowd doesn’t sell anything. It however, is the best recommendation and guidance that I can give.

Maybe that’s far more worth than any net sale or total contract value because it’s actually intended to provide relief for the execs AND the employees.

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The Digital Sherpa

My name is Philipp Rosenthal and I work as a freelance digital business coach. My passion is to help people to discover the potential of digital for their business model and to shape successful initiatives. Over 20 years of experience in agencies, corporations & consulting companies provide me with a solid set of frameworks, methods and deep understanding for company & people dynamics.